Category — iPad

In the course of working on an article about the iPad and various stands, I discovered that two of my favorite stands from Belkin, both designed for kitchen use, are on sale at Amazon at pretty decent discounts.

First, the Belkin Kitchen Cabinet Mount for iPad 2. As you can see from the image, this is a stand that attaches to a kitchen cabinet. A strong but adjustable clamp grips the cabinet, and the iPad goes in the rubber-coated brace. The brace fits tablets ranging from 7 to 10 inches, so it would work with other tablets. I like very much that the Cabinet Mount is designed to be installed and removed fairly quickly without tools, so that you could stash it in a kitchen drawer and set it up as needed. Belkin’s list price is $49.99; Amazon has it for $33.31.

I also like the Belkin Chef Stand + Stylus. (Amazon for some odd reason calls it theBelkin Kitchen Stand and Wand“). It’s a stand that allows you to use the iPad on your kitchen counter, with a companion stylus, keeping the iPad out of the way, yet usable, and food-free. Right now at Amazon, it’s $21.98, vs the list price of $39.99.

I note as well that for those with a spare iPad 2 lying around, the Belkin Fridge Mount for iPad 2 is pretty nifty. It uses removable 3M mounting strips to attach the mount to the fridge, and the mount has magnetic clips that use the built-in magnets on the iPad 2 to grasp the iPad.

I have a bone to pick with ebook publishers and the developers of ebook reader software. Read all about it on TidBITS: http://tidbits.com/article/12919

The dictation feature in the new iPad has some subtle tricks. Specifically, if you speak the names of common punctuation marks, it inserts the mark. For example, if you say, “I am me comma and you are you period” the dictation feature types, “I am me, and you are you.”

Similarly, saying “new line” inserts a line break, and “new paragraph” inserts a new paragraph.

But, suppose you say, “I think our business needs a new line of credit.” Dictation will type, “I think our business needs
credit.” Obviously, this is not what you want.

After some experimenting, I found that if I pause for a second after speaking these special terms (e.g., “I think our business needs a new line *pause* of credit” or “You should insert a comma *pause* here”), the dictation feature treats the special term as plain speech.

Naturally, your mileage may vary.

I love the new iPad’s Dictation function. It works great, especially when you speak into the iPad’s mic, which is at the top of the iPad when you hold it in portrait orientation with the Home button at the bottom. Unfortunately, when you tap the on-screen keyboard’s Dictation key, the very attractive pulsing microphone appears at the bottom of the screen. Why is that unfortunate? It may be because using the iPad is such an immersive experience, but I usually find myself talking to the glowing, pulsing onscreen mic instead of the real one.

So here’s my tip: If you find yourself talking to the animated mic, unlock the iPad’s rotation and swivel it 180 degrees so the Home button is on top. Then, when you talk into the virtual mic, you’ll also be talking to the one that can actually hear you.

First, the big news.

Apple is taking orders right now for March 16 shipping for their third version iPad. The specs are here. The crude details:

• Retina display with 3.1 million pixels (2048-by-1536-pixel resolution at 264 pixels per inch)
• New rear-facing iSight camera offering 1080p HD video recording, 5 MP images, stabilization, Auto focus (tap to focus)
• Also 2nd FaceTime camera with VGA-quality photos and video at up to 30 frames per second.
• Voice dictation (this is NOT Siri)
• An A5X CPU with quad-core graphics
• Both WiFi 4G LTE versions (buy the model for either AT&T or Verizon) and WiFi only. See Glenn Fleishman’s explanation of LTE and why you should care.
• Form factor a tiny bit larger (fractions of a millimeter larger), includes Bluetooth, battery life about the same, storage (16G, 32G, 64G) and pricing identical to the iPad 2. Black and white bodies both offered.

Apple’s shiny pictures and tasty videos are here. Smart coverage from TidBITS here, Jeff Carlson in the Seattle Times here.

Other announcements included the refreshed Apple TV, iWork updates, the $4.99 iPhoto for iOS (which is available now from the App store, and looks very very sweet, but requires iPad 2 or the new iPad), and iOS 5.1, with updates to lots of Apple’s apps, available now.

Peachpit has posted an article by me about my love for books, and the iPad:

Lisa L. Spangenberg, coauthor of The iPad 2 Project Book, readily confesses to being nuts about books. Like many of us, she is gradually becoming more comfortable with substituting digital reading for paperbacks and hardbacks, but she is already hopelessly in love with the many free (or very cheap) apps that let lovers of reading explore the written world in a whole new way.

There are so many super iPad apps for readers and bibliophile’s that I’ll be posting about some apps that I had to remove from the Peachpit article because it was already quite lengthy. In the meantime, head on over to Peachpit to read The Best iPad Apps for Book Lovers.

I like Apple’s $29.99 iPad Camera Connection Kit. It turns your iPad into a convenient place to sort and store photos from a digital camera. For example, suppose you are on vacation. You can offload each day’s “keepers” from your camera to your iPad and clear up room on the camera’s memory card for the next day. Later, when you get home, you can connect your iPad to your computer and import the keepers that you saved into your preferred photo app, such as iPhoto.

It’s three simple steps:

1. Take pictures with your digital camera.
2. Transfer keepers to iPad.
3. Copy pictures from iPad to computer.

Now, though, iCloud’s Photo Stream makes the Camera Kit even more convenient. With iCloud, as soon as you transfer your photos to your iPad, they go right into your Photo Stream. From there they are sent automatically to iCloud’s servers when your iPad has an Internet connection and, from there, they automatically download to your computer.

It’s two simple steps:

1. Take pictures with your digital camera.
2. Transfer keepers to Photo Stream via iPad.

There is no Step 3.

I’ve written a short article on Peachpit’s site on “iPad Tips for the College Student.”

I suggest several useful and time-saving iPad apps for students. None of the iPad apps I’m discussing cost more than $10.00; most are under $5.00 and quite a few are free.

Read the rest of “iPad Tips for the College Student.”

Amazon and OverDrive have begun rolling out a joint service that provides Kindle books to public library patrons. The service is integrated into the OverDrive-managed interface that over 11,000 community libraries already use to present a library’s ebook, PDF, and audiobook holdings to their patrons; when patrons browse a library’s digital collection, Kindle books now appear as one of the available download options. (This is not to say that every book has a Kindle version, of course: which books are available in which formats depends on the library’s contract with OverDrive.)

To check out Kindle library books, library users need an account at a public library that provides the OverDrive ebook service. On an iPad, a user goes to the library’s ebook Web site in Safari (in my case, for example, I go to the Santa Monica Public Library’s page at ebook.smpl.org). The browsing and checkout process is similar to that described in our 99¢ ebook, Borrow library ebooks on your iPad, until the user actually gets to the book download page. Then, instead of clicking the Download button that appears for EPUB books, one clicks a Get for Kindle button. This opens the Amazon site in Safari, and, once the user signs in, the site presents the same interface shown when a Kindle book is purchased: the user chooses the Kindle, or other Kindle-compatible device, to which the book is sent.

To return a book to the library, or to download it to additional Kindle devices or apps, one uses the Manage My Kindle page on Amazon’s site. The available management options for public library books includes a return option in addition to the other options.

Given the well-known drawbacks of the OverDrive Media Console EPUB reader, the addition of Kindle books to a public library’s ebook holdings means that iPad users can now use the much friendlier free iPad Kindle app instead.

As I wrote in The iPad 2 Projects Book, AirVideo is my favorite iPad app. Combined with iTunes Home Sharing and AirPlay, a Mac with AirVideo and AirPlay-capable devices makes a phenomenal expansive and expandable media environment.

A couple of Christmases past (or should that be Chanukahs?), my brother and co-author, Michael, gave us an AirPort Express that we initially employed on our enclosed patio to play our iTunes music through attached speakers and extend the range of our network for better reception in the backyard for our iPhones. Then, Apple released the iPad and that gave us better range for them as well — yes, we have three of them in the household at present: two originals and an iPad 2. The addition of AirPlay, coincident with the release of the iPad 2 a few months ago raised the utility of the Express quite a bit, because we could now stream the content on our iPads, and AirView leveraged it as well, providing us with external speakers for shows we were watching on our iPads.

Recently, we added a new AppleTV 2 to the mix. Now, I can stream just about any type of video that I can view on my Mac: DivX, xvid, mpeg-2, Flash, you name it, through AirVideo to an iPad and stream that content to the HDTV via the AppleTV, without being constrained by the availability of what I want to view being in a “compatible” format.

While Steve Jobs is (perhaps justifiably) accused of constructing a reality distortion field during his keynote addresses, I’m convinced that the “digital hub” that he foretold about a decade back is alive and well, firmly grounded in Apple’s ecosystem. As Carly Simon sings (music by Marvin Hammlisch and lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager), “Nobody Does It Better.”